Posts Tagged ‘space news’

ZDNet reports that NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has released plans for folks to make their own mini version of the Mars Curiosity Rover.

JPL has released designs and instructions on the now Microsoft-owned GitHub for building the mini rover that presumably will be mostly Earth-bound, rather than roaming over Mars or any other planet, unless you’re buddies with Elon Musk.

…

JPL released the instruction kit to show that it actually does take a rocket scientist to build one of these, but that those skills can also be learned by hobbyists and students.

“One would rightfully assume it takes expertise in mechanical engineering, software development, and electronics to even begin to construct such a complex robot,” JPL says in its announcement.

“Now students, hobbyists, and enthusiasts can learn about these skills and get a taste of what it is like to construct such a rover using plans and instructions from JPL’s Open Source Rover Project.”

In other words, this isn’t one of those tin can robot kits, because it’s from, like, NASA. But even if it isn’t something you can knock out in an hour, it’s still pretty cool of them to release it to the wild.

NASA has new evidence that the most likely places to find life beyond Earth are Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Enceladus particularly has almost all of the key ingredients for life as we know it, researchers said.

(NOTE: the photo above does not depict the planets in question. It’s just a cool photo of planets.)

Astronomers have found at least seven Earth-like planets orbiting the same star 40 light-years away, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The findings were also announced at a news conference at NASA Headquarters in Washington.This discovery outside of our solar system is rare because the planets have the winning combination of being similar in size to Earth and being all temperate, meaning they could have water on their surface and potentially support life.The seven exoplanets were all found in tight formation around an ultracool dwarf star called TRAPPIST-1. Estimates of their mass also indicate that they are rocky planets, rather than being gaseous like Jupiter.

That’s less cool than it sounds. Despite being SUPER COOL, this picture doesn’t help.

The video over at Business Insider (link) is very well made and definitely gets the point across in a short amount of time. That’s useful. And I’ll admit that the picture of what appears to be the Death Star got me to click.

BUT. Let’s calm down for a second. We don’t really know what this space thing is. And to be fair to Business Insider, the phrase “The peculiar dipping events in the disk-bearing young-stellar object EPIC 204278916” are not very exciting when you have no idea what they mean.

(CNN) In a discovery that has been years in the making, researchers have confirmed the existence of a rocky planet named Proxima b orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun, according to a new study. It is the closest exoplanet to us in the universe.

Cool stuff, right? It’s close to our sun so the whole “we’ll get superpowers because of a red sun” isn’t going to happen. Still, it’d be exciting if there’s life out there. See the CNN link below.